Get a Complete View of Your Disk Space

Jeff Oliver of Denver nominates JAM Software's TreeSize Professional as a hot product. According to Oliver, "This software really enables me to get a complete view of disk space and how it's allocated in a simple manner. TreeSize Professional scans a local or mapped network drive and provides output on each file and folder, including size (in kilobytes or megabytes), size allocated, the number of objects each folder contains, wasted space, percentage of capacity used, last access, last change, percentage of compression (for compressed files and folders), and owner. You can scan multiple local or network drives and view the output in a pie chart, bar graph, or details mode. File scanning is very fast, and I can have a complete report on every file and folder in a 468GB RAID array over the network in less than 3 minutes. No more right-clicking and waiting for Windows to count the size. Disk space is cheap, but this tool really helps you get the most out of what you have."

TreeSize Professional runs on Windows XP/2000/NT/Me/9x systems. Pricing is $35 for a single-user license, $98 for a 5-user license, $320 for a 25-user license, and $749 for a site license.

End Spam Worries

MailFoundry's MailFoundryEP is an email-security appliance that provides enterprise businesses with Microsoft Exchange Server protection and security on any platform. MailFoundry blocks spam and viruses in real time by using active filters that leave legitimate email alone. The appliance can autosense valid domains and mailboxes and perform the latest antispam, antivirus, and other software updates. All SMTP traffic goes through MailFoundry to protect your email and file servers from malicious attacks. MailFoundry's extensive reporting functions monitor email volume, traffic, usage, and other statistics. You can generate reports in real time and archive the reports for later analysis. The appliance can process more than 500,000 messages per day.

Eric Vandeveld of Green Bay, Wisconsin, provides high praise for MailFoundry. He says, "We have been using the MailFoundry spam and virus-filtering appliance for more than a year, and it has been rock solid. So little spam gets through now that we don't even think about spam anymore. The beauty is that the spam never even touches the Exchange server."

Process and Generate Log Reports

Bill Kennon of Houston, Texas, provides high praise for Flowerfire's Sawmill, a hierarchical log-analysis tool that can process almost any log and generate reports. Kennon says, "I have a small office/home office environment with a Cisco Systems' Cisco PIX 501 Security Appliance providing initial security for a DSL line. The PIX is a very reliable device, but I need to be sure that security is maintained, and that's a tough job. Sawmill is an excellent log-analysis tool that lets me collect all the syslog data and sort it every way imaginable. Sawmill collects, sorts, and analyzes data and can graph it by traffic across time, source and destination traffic; DNS names; service; and service response time. Currently, I collect about 280MB of data per week, which illustrates how much noise there is on a DSL line."

Sawmill can show you the traffic to your Web servers and other servers. The software features support for multiple configurations. Sawmill's built-in Web server can run on any machine. You can configure the Web server remotely and view statistics through a browser. Licensing is per configuration, with prices starting at $99 for a single-configuration license and $199 for a 5-pack license. You can purchase additional configuration license packs separately.

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